


from the beginning

by julie_slamdrews



Category: Harlots (TV)
Genre: F/F, Implied/Referenced Child Abuse, Pre-Season/Series 01
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-09-28
Updated: 2020-12-22
Packaged: 2021-03-08 02:41:44
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Rape/Non-Con, Underage
Chapters: 5
Words: 5,334
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26588320
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/julie_slamdrews/pseuds/julie_slamdrews
Summary: In which Margaret Wells arrives in Golden Square and changes Nancy Birch's world.Written for Harlots Week: Missing Scene Monday
Relationships: Nancy Birch/Margaret Wells
Comments: 20
Kudos: 20
Collections: Harlots Week 2020





	1. one

It’s raining the day they bring Margaret Wells to Golden Square. The dress she’s wearing is threadbare and she has no shoes, but she doesn’t shiver as Mrs Quigley marches her up the path. This earns her credit with the girls watching from the upstairs window, although the filthy state of her also earns her the nickname Mudpie before she’s even been formally introduced.

She has spark though, more than the bright-eyed country girls, and though she knows why she’s there she doesn’t flinch from it.

“It’s not so bad really,” she tells Nancy and Lil when they’re sent in to dress her. “I was always going to end up a whore, might as well be here as anywhere else.”

The girls exchange glances, knowing what the newcomer does not, that there is no worse house to be a whore than this.

“Quigley’s customers like pain,” Nancy says eventually, though she doesn’t know if the warning is helpful. “Like to know they’ve caused it. Best if you’re prepared.”

The new girl looks momentarily terrified, then sets her jaw and nods. “Can I do anything about that?”

Nancy shrugs helplessly. “They might be better for you,” she offers. “Seeing as you don’t have a face like a bust shoe.”

(This is only one in the long list of colourful descriptors men and women alike have used for her face over the years.)

Further conversation is cut off when one of the older girls arrives to announce the cull is ready.

Lil elbows Nancy as they watch the new girl’s departing back. “She’ll be a favourite that one,” she says bitterly. “An’ it’ll be even more slim pickings for the rest of us.”

Nancy says nothing.

(She always gets the worst of the culls, but she can’t find it in herself to resent those who get the best.)

***

When it’s over, Mrs Quigley brings her to her private quarters and serves her a meal such as she has never seen in all her ten years.

“I’ll be like a mother to you if you let me,” she coos, the words dripping like poison off a serpent’s tongue. “You have great potential and I can help you realise it.”

A mouthful of potato sticks in Margaret’s throat but she forces it down with a smile. All her life she has known bawds, their powdered faces and their smiles and their lies. But is a mother who sells her for a handful of coin any better than one who sells her for a pair of shoes?

After dinner, Mrs Quigley ushers her to a room full of girls around her own age, bids the one nearest the door find her somewhere to sleep and sweeps out in a cloud of powder.

The girl winces.

“Only space is in with Nancy,” she says apologetically and the girl beside her pauses in combing out her long red hair to give a scream of laughter.

“Rather you than me!” She says. “She ain’t right that one.”

“She’s had it hard,” the first girl chides. “She gets all the worst culls.”

“Face like that don’t need wasting on the best ones,” the redhead shrugs and Margaret is seized by sudden and fierce desire to slap her.

“Which bed?” She asks instead. The first girl motions towards the corner.

“I’m Agnes,” she says with another apologetic smile. “Let me know if you need anything.”

All Margaret really needs is sleep and she is on the verge of it when she senses a presence looming over her. It’s the girl from over her who warned her about the culls and she looks furious.

“They said this was the only free bed,” she says defensively. The girl rolls her eyes.

“They weren’t wrong,” she says. “But they might have told you that I sleep on this side.”

Her voice sounds hoarser than before and Margaret can see the beginnings of a bruise blossoming at her throat.

“Quigley’s customers like pain,” she remembers, with the uneasy feeling that what she has endured this evening might be the very least of the delights on offer. She shuffles over in the bed to make room and offers the girl a tentative smile. It isn’t returned but the glare she is fixed with becomes just fractionally less murderous.

The lights go out and the room fills with the sound of heavy breathing and suddenly Margaret is wide awake. She stares at Nancy’s back, studies the way her shoulder blades protrude through her nightgown.

“I don’t think you look like a shoe,” she says quietly into the darkness, a peace offering.

***

The friendship isn’t sealed immediately, but it is quickly apparent that Nancy hates Maggie slightly less than anyone else in Quigley’s house.

(This may be because Margaret is the only person in Quigley’s house who treats her like a human being.)

She is gruff with her as she is with everyone else, snaps at her to pick up her clothes, or stay on her side of the bed, or stop chattering when she’s trying to get some kip, but Maggie mostly responds with laughter.

Maggie rarely seems down or defeated, which is perhaps not surprising as she gets the best of everything: best food, best clothes, best culls. But even the best culls are still culls, and one day when she is undressing for bed Nancy sees vivid lines on her back where a man has dug in his fingernails and pulled down hard.

She laughs at that too though, when she sees Nancy looking, runs her fingertips over her own nails and deflects: “Should have seen the ones I gave him.”

But the laughter is more hollow than usual and that night Nancy says nothing even when Maggie crawls so far across the bed that she is left with nothing but a thin strip.

(In truth, she may be getting used to waking to the other girl’s body pressed against hers.)

A few nights later, when she is weeping tears of rage and desperation into her pillow and hoping none of the other girls can hear, Maggie rolls closer and flings an arm around her waist. As she does so she gives a not particularly convincing snore.

Nancy considers shrugging her off, snapping that she doesn’t need her pity. But this feels more like comfort than pity, and comfort is something she has had precious little of so far.

Maggie gives a more realistic snore, right in her ear, and Nancy rolls her eyes. She doubts she’ll get a wink of sleep now.

(She is asleep within ten minutes.)

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I love these two a lot and I hope I’ve done them justice.
> 
> To be continued, probably, once I’m done with all the rest of my Harlots Week stuff.


	2. two

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Harlots Week (and particularly everyone's lovely responses to my work) has given me a great big spike of writing motivation, so thank you all! I'm hoping to keep riding that wave and update this weekly. 
> 
> It gets a bit bleak in this chapter, you have been warned.

Mrs Quigley makes good her promise to treat Maggie like a daughter. Not that she is a good mother, Maggie is treated to the sting of her hand for such varied misdemeanours as talking out of turn, letting her gown hang wrong and smiling like she has a secret (when she responded to this last that Mrs Quigley herself had told her to smile like she had a secret she received another slap and a reminder that some secrets are inappropriate for young ladies...even young ladies who men are lining up to violate).

Instead, motherhood from a bawd comes in the form of the finest silk for her gowns, the best scraps from Quigley’s own table (but only when she can show it has no adverse effect on her waistline) and culls lining up at the door for a go on her.

The other girls have stopped calling her Mudpie (it would be an inappropriate nickname anyhow, to get muddy she would need to be allowed outside) and now follow her around like shadows, hoping that her favour with the mistress may be catching. She chatters and laughs with them easily enough, shares tips to soothe belligerent culls and to keep them coming back for more. But it is still Nancy whose company she seeks out, although most of the other girls are afraid of her and several of the culls to boot.

She asks Nancy why she fights them once, when she is still green enough to believe her friend might improve her lot at Quigley’s simply by resisting less. The look Nancy turns on her is so fierce that Maggie is almost afraid herself.

“How can you not fight when a man’s trying to take what ain’t his?” She asks.

Maggie has never really considered it in these terms. It isn’t that she likes whoring and she has had her fair share of the pain that some men wish to inflict on their conquests (Quigley seems to attract more of this kind of man than most bawds). But mostly it is just work. It was her mother’s work and now it is hers and if she has daughters of her own she supposes it will be theirs too.

The men always, always take, but sometimes they give in return - a sweet, a hair ribbon, even from time to time a coin on top of what they have paid Quigley. She hides these under her mattress. She is allowed in the older girls’ parlour sometimes now, to learn from them, and the most valuable lesson she has learned so far is that these girls are trapped not by locks and keys but by debt. She doesn’t know how much her debt is exactly, but every time Quigley provides her with a new gown she is sure to smile particularly sweetly at the culls who may be good for another sovereign or two.

She looks into Nancy’s glowering face, her glare made more menacing by an eye blackened so bad that no paint will cover it. This is not from a cull but from Quigley herself, after Nancy took a cull in her mouth and then bit down hard. The man fled the house without exacting punishment but Quigley ensured she wasn’t spared it.

Maggie finds she cannot respond. She knows that if her culls gave only bruises and spilled blood in return for what they took, it would be harder to bear the taking.

***

Fairy tales don’t reach the walls of foundling homes or bawdy houses, which is probably just as well as the lives of those inside resemble nothing so little as fairy stories. So Nancy did not grow up dreaming of a prince on a white horse coming to sweep her away (even once she learns of the concept she will scoff at it).

Her dreams are rather more pedestrian. As a child, enough food to fill the aching hole in her belly and blankets which are warm and don’t scratch. Lately, this has been exchanged for culls who don’t wish to use her body as a canvas for their sickest fantasies. Or, in her wildest dreams, no culls at all and a little house where she could just be.

Mags would be there too of course although she has not yet deciphered the strange fluttering feeling in her gut that sometimes awakens in her presence. It mostly comes late at night, when the two of them huddle in the bed and share their dreams of a future away from here.

It is perhaps just as well that she has not been bred on a diet of fairy tales. Even two centuries later they will not be written for girls like her.


	3. Chapter 3

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Harlots Week may be over but this fic absolutely isn't! Still working through the heavy stuff at the moment, but I promise I have plotted some light at the end of the tunnel...eventually...

From time to time a group of girls is taken from the large room they share, told that they are ‘ageing up’. They no longer need to be hidden away, accessed only by men of certain desires and certain coinage. The real work begins.

For Maggie, the move means new gowns, and Mrs Quigley supervises the fitting, making the most of the opportunity to let her know what a lucky girl she is.

“They don’t dress their girls in silk just anywhere you know,” she says, running her fingers along a length of delicately-embroidered fabric. “But no expense will be spared for my darling girl.”

Maggie shivers in her stays, feeling unusually exposed. Modesty means little to her usually, she does not turn to the wall to change in the bedroom like Nancy, but practices removing each item of clothing with a flourish. Some of the girls try to copy her movements when she does this, others groan that they don’t want to tup her so can she leave off giving them an eyeful.

She does not always undress for the culls, but when she does it is a performance and she takes pride in how their eyes slide down her body. The more she enchants them, the better they tip.

Quigley does not watch her like a cull though. Her eyes probe and judge and calculate, seeing every inch of her flesh as an asset to be sold. Under her gaze, Maggie’s skin doesn’t feel like her own.

“Don’t look so sour,” Quigley snaps. “You’ve been spending too much time with that little friend of yours. I do hope her looks aren’t as catching as her expressions.”

One day, Maggie thinks, she will hurt her. For this small slight and the thousands of larger ones, collecting over the years like raindrops in a puddle. One day that puddle will be big enough to drown her.

That day is not today though. Today she rearranges her face into her sweetest smile, thanks Quigley for her generosity today and all days, though the words taste bitter in her mouth.

***

When they are first told that they are ageing up, Nancy is fool enough to be excited. Mags has told her about her brief visits to the parlour, and she knows that the culls choose girls for themselves there. And surely nobody would choose her in a line-up of Maggie and Lil and Mary and Lizzie, not to mention those older girls that she knows nothing of. She is sure of one thing though, they will be more desirable than her.

For years this has been her downfall, securing her the worst of the scum who creep through Quigley’s doors. Now, perhaps, it will be her saving grace.

Of course, it is not.

They are sauntering in a line to the parlour (or the others are sauntering, Nancy cannot make her gait light and easy like the others), when jerks to an unplanned halt, her wrist held fast in Quigley’s claw-like fingers.

“And where do you think you’re going?”

She always speaks to Nancy in this tone, the one which implies she is incredibly small and incredibly stupid.

“You don’t really think I’d have you in my parlour, frightening away the gentlemen?”

Nancy doesn’t say that this is exactly what she’d thought, what she’d hoped. She feels stupid now for daring to have that hope, and besides Quigley has rarely shown any interest in what she has to say.

She watches the other girls disappear through the double doors, and the sound of music and laughter drifts towards her. And then the doors are shut and Quigley is back, with a fat smirking man on her arm.

“This is the girl I was telling you about,” she beams. “I think you’ll find she fits your needs perfectly.”

For Nancy, ageing up will not mean glittering parties or tasteful salons or promenades through the pleasure gardens. It will only mean more pain.

***

“How much do you think all this costs?” Maggie asks. She is undressing for bed and everything is on display. Nancy averts her eyes. She knows Maggie wouldn’t mind if she watched, that possibly she even wants her to (Maggie is never happier than when all eyes are on her), but it feels dishonest somehow.

Dishonest when Maggie doesn’t know what looking does to her. Nancy still lacks the vocabulary to truly describe the feeling (five years in a whorehouse have taught her every imaginable word for sex but none for love), but she knows it is not how she should feel when looking at her friend, not even her best friend, not even her only friend.

She has not told Maggie this, would not even if she had the words, and looking without telling makes her feel worse than a cull. For at least the culls are transparent in their intentions.

Maggie talks about money a lot now, which is another topic where she lacks vocabulary. She is not naïve to the ways of the world, she knows it powers everything and she’s sure she has made Quigley plenty, every scar a purse of coin. But she has never handled it herself, coin is always exchanged for her, never by her.

“It’s got to be a lot,” Maggie presses. “Our own room now, and all these gowns?”

Her new gowns rest in a shining heap beside Nancy’s single outfit. There are no new gowns for girls who are kept hidden in back rooms, fed to the darkest monsters of London’s underbelly while their friends parade for the gentry upstairs.

“We should just run,” she says. “You might earn your way out, but I’ve not seen so much as a farthing since I got here.”

Maggie goes to the door, twists at the knob in what she knows will be a futile gesture. The door rattles slightly in its frame but remains stubbornly closed.

“We should run,” she echoes. “But we need a plan.”

They are both silent. They have more dreams than most girls in their position would dare, but plans are in short supply.


	4. Chapter 4

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So this chapter has been a labour of love. Getting to this point has involved countless rewrites and an awful lot of googling as I tried to determine what sweets would have been available in this time period and what words they would have used for menstruation. I'm still very much uncertain on that second one, so if anyone reading can help with that then let me know in the comments. 
> 
> I'm actually really pleased with the finished product though (and I don't say that often). I hope you enjoy it too.

That summer, there is an important change. From the snatches of gossip Mags passes on from the parlour, Nance gathers there is a child in the house.

Rumour suggests it may even be Quigley’s own, though none of the girls can remember her belly swelling, nor indeed does she ever seem to take men to her own chambers. Regardless, it seems she has a fondness for the child, and has kept it for her own rather than sending it straight to the foundling hospital.

A sigh of relief goes through the house when they learn it is a boy. Several of them have had the dubious honour of being Mrs Quigley’s adopted daughter, and they would not wish that fate even on her own flesh and blood.

One hot afternoon, when Mags and the rest have gone to take a turn around the pleasure gardens and Nancy is lying on the bed, fantasising about burning this whole damned place to the ground, she hears a baby’s cry. The door is unlocked (though she knows her freedom only extends within the walls of the house as there will be a bully stationed at the front of the house as usual, to protect Quigley’s assets), so she steps out into the corridor and goes towards the sound. A few doors down, she finds the source.

A tall, thin girl, her beauty somewhat marred by a bruise swallowing most of her left cheek, is frantically rocking a thrashing bundle of fury. She looks up as Nancy pokes her head around the door, the desperation coming off her in waves.

“You don’t know anything about babes, do you?” She asks. “Quigley said I was to watch him as I’d get no custom at the gardens looking like this and she’ll be spitting mad if she comes back to find him in such a state.”

“Put him down a minute.” Nancy gestures to the cradle. She’s held a fair few babes in her time, growing up surrounded by unwanted children, but they were mostly small and weak and less inclined to kick. Quigley’s babe is fat and spoiled and like to end up on the floor if they try to pass him over. She doesn’t fancy explaining that to his mother.

Placed in his cradle, the child only screams harder. Nancy rolls her eyes.

“What you got to cry about?” She asks him, though the question is softer and more amused than it might be. The baby waves his pudgy fists at the sound of her voice, though he continues to scream. Of course, given everything he could possibly want for, he is bored.

There is a bowl of sweets on the table, brightly-coloured things that are perfect to catch a small child’s eye. She plucks one out and holds it in front of him. He makes a grasping motion in the air, the cries slowing to small hiccups. Nancy closes her own fist around the treat and widens her eyes.

“Where’s it gone?” She teases. His gaze fixes on hers and he gives a gurgle of confusion. Satisfied that she has his full attention, she drops her hand down towards the side of his head, out of his line of vision, and then pulls it back up with the sweet revealed. A couple of rounds of this and he is giggling and thumping his hands together in an approximation of applause.

They might have carried on like this for longer had they not been interrupted by a smattering of real applause from the doorway and a voice, ostensibly pleasant, which sends chills down her spine.

“Very good,” Quigley praises. “He certainly seems to like you.”

Nancy knows this must be a trap of sorts, but she has no idea how to escape it, so she does the only thing that comes into her head.

“I’m good with littluns,” she says, a spark of pride in her voice. “I could help with him if you liked.”

Any hope that Quigley might take her up on the offer vanishes when the bawd throws back her head and laughs.

“You think…” She chokes. “I would take…a whore for a nursemaid?”

“I’m a terrible whore,” Nancy says, half-defiant, half-plaintive. “The culls hate me.”

“My dear girl,” Quigley says. It is the first time Nancy has ever been addressed as such, but she knows it is no good thing for the bawd’s mouth still twitches with mirth. “You are of value to me precisely for that reason. Some men thrive on hatred.”

Nancy does not need to be told this, her life these past five years has been an endless string of encounters with such men. Quigley isn’t done yet though. She is smiling, but there is a hard look behind her eyes that matches the edge to her voice as she says: “Do you know, I might have a use for you after all?”

***

The girls in the parlour laugh when Maggie attempts to make enquiries as to the best way out of Golden Square.

“You’ll not leave here until you’re in your shroud,” Bessie tells her frankly. “None of us will. Once that woman has her claws in you she’ll not leave go.”

This is, in many ways, the answer she was expecting, but it is not a helpful one. She will not live out the rest of her days in a gilded cage.

But while the others can offer no escape routes, their insistence that it cannot be done offers its own clues.

She learns that she must take nothing that can be linked to the house, not even the clothes on her back. That the bedroom doors are not locked until all the culls have left the house, and that this is a task which Mrs Quigley sees to herself. That there are two bullies stationed on the door at all times (but bullies are, at the end of the day, only men, and Maggie can handle men). And, most importantly, that Mrs Quigley will pursue her to the ends of the earth if she does leave, so Maggie must have some means by which to fight her when she does.

It is not a plan yet, not exactly, but it is the beginning of one.

Soon though, fate hurls more rocks into her path. Though she takes all the usual precautions, she misses one monthly, then two, and then she begins to feel queasy and light-headed in the mornings. All whores are taught to know these signs and to fear them.

She lies awake at night, hands cupped over her stomach and runs through her options. They are not exactly plentiful.

She can try to escape now, but she still knows more about what won’t work in that regard than what will. And besides, giving birth under a bridge or in a doorway was never part of her grand plan.

She can stay here, risk Quigley throwing her out anyway, though this seems unlikely with many of her best whoring years ahead of her. A far greater risk is that the baby will be taken from her and sent to the foundling hospital or even drowned in a bucket like an unwanted kitten. She isn’t sure why she’s so attached to the thing, it’s causing her nothing but trouble, but thinking of harm coming to it sends a pang through her even now.

She can tell the father, and he will whisk her away to a grand house and wait on her as his lady. Except, which of the endless parade of men can she blame for her current predicament? And, more importantly, who is most likely to react in the right way? Maggie sighs heavily. The most likely answer to that is none. It is the foolish dream of a foolish girl who has got herself in a foolish situation.

The sigh must disturb Nancy, because she stirs slightly and shuffles closer, close enough that Maggie can feel a whisper of breath on her shoulder. She bites her lip. Her skin feels hypersensitive lately, like the slightest touch could set her ablaze, and this is frankly unhelpful. In fact, it may well be another problem to add to the list.

It is one more problem than she has the energy to deal with tonight though, and so she rolls away from temptation and drifts into sleep, dreaming foolish hopeful dreams of the lord and the big house. Except the lord’s face keeps twisting and changing behind her eyelids and sometimes it isn’t the face of a lord at all.


	5. Chapter 5

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So it's been a minute, but I was absolutely not in the mood to write angst for a bit. But then Harlots Fic Appreciation happened and the winter drabbles happened and I got all up in my feels, particularly about pre-canon happenings, and this was the result. 
> 
> I would say I won't leave it so long before the next chapter, but I'm trying not to make promises I can't keep.

As Nancy had suspected, Quigley’s surprise for her is nothing good. It is a girl in a locked room, which isn’t an unusual occurrence in Golden Square, but this one hasn’t the faintest idea what she’s doing there.

Quigley has given Nancy no instructions other than to “prepare her”, and though she hasn’t explicitly said for what it doesn’t take a genius to work it out.

She hasn’t prepared a girl since Maggie stumbled out of the gutter five years hence, and this girl is nothing like Maggie. She remembers the defiant tilt of her friend’s chin, her insistence that here is as good a place as any to be a whore. This girl, cringing away from her into the bedclothes, doesn’t even seem to know what a whore is.

Nancy does her best, but her talents at soothing children extend only so far as lullabies and games of peekaboo. And her talents at training whores are non-existent. By the time she leaves the room the girl has at least stopped crying and put on the pretty dress Quigley had left, but is a victory so hollow it barely counts as one.

“Why me?” Nancy wants to ask, as Quigley leads her back to her own prison. “Why her? Why do you do this to us?” But asking questions of Quigley has never yielded pleasant answers, so she drags her fury silently through the corridors.

“Not going to ask me where she came from?” The bawd asks. Nancy says nothing. If her silence rankles Quigley, then so much the better. But she has not yet dealt the killing blow.

“You can ask your friend.” There is an unpleasant emphasis on the word friend, as if Quigley can look straight into her head and see her every secret thought. “She knows about that girl. And all the others.”

***

“Why does Quigley say you know about the girls?” Nancy asks into the darkness.

Maggie has been waiting for this since Mrs Quigley first told her she had “a special job for my special girl.” Back then she had still thought that was a good thing, that Quigley’s favour was something to be desired. It is still, she supposes, though only because if you must be any girl in Quigley’s house you may as well be the best. But when that favour means that she must look sweet, trusting girls in the face and drag them to their doom with a lie and a smile? Well then she wishes to be only second best.

“I go hunting for them with her,” she says haltingly. Her voice sounds wrong even to her own ears, thinner and shakier than usual. “There’s a place where girls come to look for work. She makes me tell them I’m her daughter, that we’re looking for a housemaid. Says they come more easily for me.”

And they had, for a time, until she had lost the stomach for it, been unable to carry on smiling and lying, lying and smiling. She wants to tell Nancy that she had been principled, that she had refused to keep doing Quigley’s bidding, when in truth she had just become so bad at it that the bawd had relieved her of her duties.

“I don’t do it no more,” she says instead, hedging around the truth of the matter as if the evasion will absolve her. “But she finds more girls either way.”

Nancy’s hand finds hers in the dark and squeezes.

“When we’re bawds all the girls will be there by choice,” she says. “And the doors won’t have locks.”

This is a common refrain between the two of them, and usually Maggie would take it up with pleasure, spin their future house around them with her words until it is a surprise to see the familiar furniture of Golden Square around them. Tonight it is too dark to see that furniture, too dark even to see her own hand in front of her face, and too dark for dreams of the future too.

“I’ll never be a bawd,” she says hopelessly. She tastes salt and realises for the first time that she is crying. She blames the parasite in her belly for that, robbing her of all control over her emotions. “Might not even be a whore much longer, not in this house at least.”

“What d’you mean?” Nancy asks, puzzled. “You’re still her best girl, aintcha? Why’d she let a prize like you free?”

Maggie brings their joined hands to her belly, which has a noticeable curve now although it is still just small enough to be hidden under her layers of clothing during the day. “I’m having a baby, Nance,” she says brokenly. “I’ll be nobody’s best girl then.”

She is so distracted by her own self-pity that she almost misses Nancy’s response.

“You’ll always be mine.”

It is so unexpected and yet so sincere that it shocks the tears away. Shocks everything else in the world away, so there is nothing but this room and this bed and the two of them with their joined hands and their shallow breathing.

She is silent a beat too long, none of the pretty words she would usually use to flirt and flatter seeming to carry sufficient weight for this moment, and Nancy begins to speak again, to retract, to cover. Maggie still can’t find any suitable words so instead she rolls over, closes the space between them and swallows the stammered apologies with her lips.

The kiss is inelegant, their noses and chins bump in the dark and Maggie knows her face is still sticky with the residue of her tears. After five years of learning every possible way to tantalise, to tease, and to evoke pleasure, she supposes she could have made a better effort.

But none of her elegantly-choreographed seductions have ever made fire curl through her belly and between her legs as it does now. And though she has heard her own name fall from many lips, it has never sounded sweeter than it does coming from Nancy’s. 


End file.
